Thomson, Coleridge et Turner : La « harpe éolienne» et la musique de la nature

Abstract

The figure of the eolian harp inspired several artists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries : for instance, through a painting kept in the City of Manchester Art Galleries, Turner offered a pictorial representation of an ode written by Thomson about that instrument, while Coleridge composed a famous poem addressed to his wife on the same theme. In the three works considered the harp provides a metaphor for the artistic creative power of nature, which is supposed to play its ' music ' on it. In Turner's painting, it also serves as a synecdoche while it is mostly a pretext for the elegy in Thomson's ode. In Coleridge's poem it assumes an even greater symbolical value, as it is raised to the status of explanatory paradigm for macrocosm and microcosm alike. After thus analyzing the relevance and function of the figure, this article traces back the preromantic and romantic artists' interest in it to ancient myth, technical invention and philosophical concerns.